As discussed several times in previous posts, I status matched to British Airways (BA) from Delta back in May. My Delta Platinum status matched to BA Gold which is quite a valuable status to hold as it also grants OneWorld Emerald status. OneWorld Emerald gets you some valuable additional benefits when flying domestically on American Airlines. You get free Main Cabin Extra seats, lounge access for you and a guest on domestic flights (including business class and first class lounges where available), priority standby, and free checked bags. The lounge access on domestic flights is not available when you earn status through American Airlines directly (unless you also hold a specific high annual fee AA credit card which pretty much anyone can get). BA Gold/OneWorld Emerald also allows you to pick seats on BA without charge for you and anyone traveling with you which can be helpful as they even charge for seat selection in business class.

To extend the temporary BA Gold status, I was required to book and fly a paid business or first class ticket to Europe originating in the US before November 8th. As I was planning a trip to the UK anyway, I booked a round-trip, open-jaw business class ticket using Amex Membership Rewards points (with a 35% points rebate thanks to holding a business platinum card). This counts as a paid ticket as BA sees it as a cash purchase even though I used points. Amex basically just cashes out your points at 1 cent per point and buys you a ticket then gives you 35% back so the effective redemption is 1.54 cents per point. My route was JFK-LHR-ATL. About two weeks before the flight, I upgraded the return flight to First Class using Avios. It was my understanding that this would not affect the promotion as I had a “paid” ticket in business class which met the terms.

Upon my return, I checked the BA app after three days (that’s usually when flights will credit). To my surprise, I had been downgraded from Gold to Blue (basic member) on November 9th. I realized that for some reason, BA had credited my Avios upgrade on my outbound flight from JFK-LHR and showed me as having purchased a premium economy ticket for that leg. I called in and spoke to someone who recognized the error and said they would fix it.

A few days later, I received an email saying basically, “sorry, you upgraded a premium economy ticket so you don’t meet the terms of the promotion.” I emailed back and stated: “sorry but you are looking at the wrong flight. The upgrade for November 6th from LHR-ATL was paid in Avios but that was from business to first. There was no upgrade on the October 31st flight as that was booked and flown in business. Thus, I met the terms of the promotion.”

Thankfully, that did the trick. The next day, my app updated to show I was Gold again. Because of the way BA’s status earning calendar works, my status was extended all the way until February 28, 2026. So, that’s basically 22 months of BA Gold status from an initial status match.

While we don’t fly on AA a ton living in Atlanta (and never on Alaska), our daughter is in the DC area so we expect to get some use out of this status on those flights and possibly others. Not only that but thanks to the Hawaiian/Alaska merger, I was able to transfer a bunch of Amex points to Hawaiian and then move those to Alaska, who often has great prices on AA partner award seats.

I generally don’t recommend booking a paid business class ticket just to extend status, but in this case, I was taking the trip anyway and the price of the ticket was reasonable (around 207k net Amex points round-trip minus the ~15k Avios earned for taking the flights). I hope to take advantage of my OneWorld status a few times in the next year and a half.

If you have questions about this post, let me know in the comments or send me an email at emptynestermiles@gmail.com. If you are thinking about opening a new credit card, please use one of my links.